The room seemed brighter, the world sharper, the tapestry of existence more intricate than ever before

[Hister]

In the dim glow of my computer screen, the digital waves of the dark web had led me to a peculiar purchase: bath salts, rumored to have curious effects. Curiosity got the better of me, and I sprinkled a pinch into the warm water of my bathtub. As I sank into the tub, a peculiar sensation washed over me—a lightheadedness that seemed to lift me from the confines of reality.

I stumbled out of the tub, my senses tingling with an unfamiliar clarity. I sat down behind my computer, the room spinning slightly as I navigated to gutenberg.org. My fingers danced over the keys, and soon I was immersed in the labyrinthine prose of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake."

The words on the screen began to break apart, letters swirling and dancing in a chaotic ballet. Voices, not my own, whispered in my ear, fragments of sentences that made no sense yet held a strange allure. "Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay," they chanted, echoing in the chambers of my mind.

Reality began to fracture. The walls of my room morphed into undulating waves, the furniture twisted into grotesque shapes. The characters in the book—HCE, ALP, Shem, and Shaun—emerged from the screen, their faces melting and reforming, their voices overlapping in a cacophony of sound. "Here comes everybody," they sang, their words blending into a discordant symphony.

I tried to focus, but the boundaries of my consciousness blurred. The screen flickered, and I saw glimpses of other realities—a world where the sky was an ocean, where trees walked and talked, where time flowed backwards. The lightheadedness intensified, and I felt myself slipping into a void, a place where logic had no hold.

The voices grew louder, more insistent. "What way was she after leaving me?" they demanded, their questions piercing the fog of my mind. I tried to answer, but my thoughts fragmented, scattering like leaves in the wind. The words of the book became indistinguishable from my own thoughts, a chaotic blend of meaning and nonsense.

As I reached the end of the book, the voices reached a crescendo. "A way a lone a last a loved a long the" they sang, the words looping in an endless cycle. I felt a surge of energy, a burst of clarity that was both exhilarating and terrifying. The room spun wildly, and I felt myself falling, falling into the abyss of my own mind.

I closed the browser, the glow of the screen fading into the darkness of my room. The bath salts, the book, the journey—all had been part of a singular, surreal experience. As I lay back in my bed, the voices still echoed in my mind, a testament to the power of literature and altered states to break down the barriers of reality.